Sarah Durand, a spokeswoman for the Bevin campaign, said the businessman’s campaign continues to be confident they will the primary, despite McConnell’s advantages.

“After spending millions and millions of dollars, Mitch McConnell’s lead continues to shrink and we are well positioned for a historic victory on May 20,” she said.

Allison Moore, the spokeswoman for the McConnell campaign, said the GOP’s Senate leader is relying on his ground game and record.

“Senator McConnell has been running an extremely effective and sophisticated grassroots campaign that has galvanized conservative voters behind him,” she said.

Although Bevin is supported by national conservative and Tea Party groups, Kentucky voters are unpersuaded, Moore said.

“Matt Bevin and outside groups have spent a great deal of money but ultimately they’re running against a very strong conservative and trying to convince Kentuckians that Mitch McConnell is something else is a fool’s errand,” she said. “We feel very comfortable about where we’re at in the general election and confident that Mitch McConnell will return Kentucky’s voice to the Senate as Majority Leader next year.”

Ryan Alessi, the managing editor of the Time Warner show “Pure Politics,” a daily program about Kentucky politics, said a year ago, most people expected McConnell to beat Bevin, but what is surprising is how much money Bevin has raised and how well he has done, so far. “Pure Politics” is broadcast in the state’s five media markets.

Bevin, however, has not been able to convince Kentucky Republicans to give the nomination to him over McConnell, he said.

In the general election, McConnell will have a tougher fight against Grimes, he said.

“McConnell by all virtues starts with an advantage in the general election,” he said. “I have not seen a single poll yet that shows Bevin ahead of Grimes.”

Bevin is doing better than other challengers to McConnell, he said. “If he gets 34 percent, he would have done very, very well.”

Alessi said that national conservative and Tea Party groups supporting Bevin do not appreciate the buffer between Capitol Hill politics and life in Kentucky.

“Issues that seem to grab the press or these national groups are not the things that motivate Kentucky voters,” he said.

The best example is the Olmstead Lock and Dam, a $2 billion federal project that McConnell included in the deal that ended the partial shutdown of the federal government, he said. For conservatives, the dam funding was a huge scandal, but in Kentucky, nobody seemed to even notice. “There is a disconnect.”

Unlike other southern states, the Democrats never controlled Kentucky as completely as they did other states, he said. But, now the Republicans do not have the some control in the state as they do in other southern states.

In Kentucky, there has only been one Republican governor in 40 years, he said.

If in 2014, the Republicans win both houses of the legislature, it will be a first, he said.

Lasley said in the GOP Senate primary, Bevin has run a terrible campaign, which is surprising given the money he has raised and the national interest in the campaign.

“On paper at least, Bevin is a pretty smart guy,” the professor said.

One example of one of Bevin’s unforced errors was his decision to go to Corbin, Ky., and to speak to a group calling for the legalization of cock-fighting, he said.

“Either way you paint the picture, it is not a particularly positive picture,” he said. “If he knew what was going on at the rally, it’s an odd decision to be there. If he didn’t know what the rally was for, then his campaign is incompetent.”

The mistake was not fatal, but it feeds into the narrative that McConnell has become more distance from the people of Kentucky, he said.

Regardless of the results, this is McConnell’s last campaign, he said.

Author: Neil McCabe
Neil W. McCabe is the editor of HE's "Guns & Patriots" e-letter and was a senior reporter at the Human Events newspaper. McCabe deployed with the Army Reserve to Iraq for 15 months as a combat historian. For many years, he was a reporter and photographer for "The Pilot," Boston's Catholic paper. He was also the editor of the free community papers "The Somerville (Mass.) News and "The Alewife (North Cambridge, Mass.)." Email him: [email protected] Follow him on Twitter: @neilwmccabe.